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At Overland Partners, tracking our carbon footprint provides us with the opportunity to imagine and apply new solutions, starting with our own work environment.

Since 2015, Overland has been producing annual sustainability reports to measure the the firm’s progress toward environmental impact. These reports break down Overland’s yearly carbon emissions by category to help the firm identify areas of recent improvement and discover future opportunities.

At Overland Partners, tracking our carbon footprint provides us with the opportunity to imagine and apply new solutions, starting with our own work environment. Since 2015, Overland has been producing annual...

Meet
Shoei Umeyama, early 19th century Japanese scholar and time
traveler.

Shoei’s travels brought him to 21st
century suburban San Antonio, Texas, where he intensely documented his studies
on culture, habits and the built environment to educate his contemporaries.
Today, this body of work is shown at the Umeya Time Teleportation Museum
(also known as UTTM for short).

Shoei Umeyama is the fictional protagonist in
our current artist Hiromi Stringer’s show. He was born out of Hiromi’s
ongoing love/hate relationship with contemporary art and her time in San
Antonio. She has spent the better part of a decade here after moving
stateside to study art at UTSA. Since earning her MFA, Hiromi remained at UTSA
to teach while pursuing her own art.

An immersive work in an era where immersive art
is steadily becoming more mainstream, the UTTM transports the mind and eye
rather than the physical body into the work. This creates a dual
experience for the viewer who may approach each piece as both visitor of the
museum and guest at Hiromi’s show. What is the relationship between
artist, art and viewer? This becomes even more muddled with the inclusion of
museum labels in the form of graphite drawings that act as intermediary between
Shoei’s documentation for his fellow Japanese scholars and UTTM’s curator
communicating the significance of his work to an american audience. What
is the role of authorship in visual art? Must label accompany art?
All of these are questions Hiromi poses. If you are curious, the art
labels shown in our space are indeed labeled.

The work does not seek merely to document this
world, but to understand it by literally drawing connections to the world he
understands, transforming the foreign into the familiar. These links,
rendered in pencil studies, explained in calligraphy and occasionally annotated
in red, lead the viewer to attentively view the cultural trappings so familiar
we take for granted or no longer see. This serious observation results in
rich and layered pieces, marked by a rigor not only in the art itself but in
the narrative Hiromi has created for us.

The
observations of Umeyama showcase a range of humor, cheekiness and imagination,
yet all give insight that will alter your perception of the mundane. The
light teasing of rituals and symbols we hold closely can only be categorized as
affectionate: a playful analysis without condemnation.

In
fact, when we are observing the work we are viewing both pieces of Umeyama’s
work and pieces of the museum; fire alarms, mechanical controls, signage
complete with minor vandalism from past visitors, they all come together
to create an experience.

Both
Hiromi’s created museum and the work she creates for Umeyama take hold of the
everyday stuff so familiar we never see; let alone study or question. The
debris of modern culture, born out of the growing influence of technology and
safety regulations on our built environment. And while showing pieces
that display less glamorous pieces of the everyday is not by any means new*
Hiromi displays both rigor and a conceptual accessibility that you do not often
find in works of similar subjects. To experience Hiromi’s work is to make
the familiar new again.

Represented by Cinnabar Art Gallery. Founded by Susan
Oliver Heard, a GIA graduate gemologist and jeweler, mineral dealer, writer,
and curator. Cinnabar’s first opening was September 5, 2013 and featured
a solo show for world renowned photographer George Krause. George Krause: San
Miguel Exposed received the choice award for Foto Septiembre.

Cinnabar Gallery has been featured in local and national
publications such as Artforum, Sculpture magazine, Garden & Gun, San
Antonio Express-News, Rivard Report, and the San Antonio Current.

*Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain
was exhibited in 1917, if you are not familiar google it. You will not
regret.

Meet Shoei Umeyama, early 19th century Japanese scholar and time traveler. Shoei’s travels brought him to 21st century suburban San Antonio, Texas, where he intensely documented his studies on culture,...

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